Movistar told customers this morning’s phone blackout ‘barely showed’. Thousands disagree, and here is how to claim

Customers of Movistar, O2 and Digi spent a chunk of Thursday morning with no signal, failed calls and patchy data after a fault on Telefónica’s network. First alerts came in to Downdetector around 9.40am. El Mundo put the outage at about two hours. Telefónica later told reporters there was “no problem”, that it was fixed, and that it “barely showed”, to the indignation of thousands. User reports say otherwise.

Who lost signal, and where

Madrid and Barcelona led the complaints, but the fault was not a local mast. Digi rides on Movistar’s network where it has no kit of its own (a setup Euro Weekly News has already set out for anyone picking a Spanish mobile plan) and O2 is a Telefónica brand, so one fault took out three brands at once. On Digi, roughly four in five reports were mobile coverage or mobile data, with voice calls making up 13 to 16 per cent. Movistar and O2 also saw home fibre and wifi drop. El Debate described a full loss of signal in various parts of the country. Nobody has owned up to what broke.

Why two hours was not a minor blip

A dead handset is a nuisance if you are scrolling. It is a different matter if you are older, live alone, or trying to ring a clinic, a relative or an ambulance. Businesses that rely on communications technology lost 2 hours of work. Voice calling was part of the fault, and in some homes the fibre went down too, which knocks out the landline fallback. Roams, a comparison site, put it plainly: a short cut still counts if it lands on a call that cannot wait. No published case has tied a failed 112 call to this outage. That is not the same as proof that nobody was stuck.

What the bill credit is actually worth

None of the firms has offered a payout. Spanish rules do require a small indemnity when a billed service is cut, a point consumer groups made again after earlier Movistar faults and which this paper covered after the 2025 national blackout. If calls and data both die, the sum is the larger of two prorated figures: the average of what you paid over the last three months, or five times the monthly fee, both scaled to the hours you were out. Automatic credit only kicks in at €1 or more. Two hours on a normal mobile bill is a few cents. Internet-only cuts are tighter still: automatic payment usually needs at least six hours between 8am and 10pm. Contract small print often waits until about eight hours down in a month. Roams sets out the maths here.

How to put the claim in

Digi customers claim against Digi, not Telefónica. Movistar and O2 customers claim against Telefónica. Note the start and end times, then open a reclamación: 1004 or Mi Movistar for Movistar and O2; 1200 from a Digi line, or 919 120 120 from another network. Ask for the reference number. OCU says the written complaint should go in within a month. Operators have about a month to answer. If the robot will not put you through, ask for “un operador” – the customer-service rules now on the books are worth knowing. If they refuse or stay silent, the next stop is a consumer arbitration board or the Oficina de Atención al Usuario de Telecomunicaciones (910 305 418). Casares town hall already hands out a ready-made form for repeated cuts on the Costa del Sol, which Euro Weekly News reported in July, a useful model if your street has been dropping signal for weeks, not just this morning.